But this autumn, the “Cirque Georges Laraque,” as he calls it, has pulled down the big top. If you want the Ringling Brothers, he said on the eve of Canadiens training camp, you’ll need to go elsewhere.

Inside and out, this is a new Laraque, one who aims to focus purely on hockey and his role on a virtually new team.

He dropped 20 pounds over the summer, his current 245 the lightest he’s been since he was drafted into the NHL by Edmonton in 1995.

He dramatically changed his diet. As a vegan, Laraque now eats no meat, fish or dairy products.

He says he’ll no longer be the go-to guy for an insatiable media machine whose talk-shows and frothing panelists covet him for the ratings spike he provides.

Reluctantly, in the aftermath of the San Jose Sharks’ bold trade for Dany Heatley, it might be time to jump back on the bandwagon of the NHL’s perennial underachievers.

The Sharks, who generally follow an exceptional regular season with a do-nothing playoff, have been hinting about major changes since their first-round pratfall to the Anaheim Ducks last spring.

That it took until the eve of training camp for Sharks general manager Doug Wilson to pull off a deal speaks to the warring factions inside the organization, the unwillingness to gut a team that finished with 115 points to win the President’s Trophy last season against the clear sense that something needed to be done to rouse his remaining players to attention.

In the 28-year-old Heatley, a two-time 50-goal scorer who had demanded a trade from the Ottawa Senators in the spring, they may just have found the missing piece of the puzzle.

General manager Ken Holland confirmed that defenseman Andreas Lilja will start the season on long-term injured reserve. Lilja, who hasn’t been cleared for contact due to headaches and concussion-like symptoms, isn’t even allowed to skate with the team in practices. Lilja said he hopes to skate on his own Monday.

Lilja on IR puts the Wings under the salary cap, so there’s no need to trade a defenseman for the time being.

“Lils has had a setback,’’ Babcock said. “It doesn’t look to me like he’s in the picture at all.’‘

Jarret Stoll is not on the ice today, as he recovers from a surprising bout with arthritis. Stoll said he has been taking medication and receiving shots for the pain in his right wrist and said “by no means am I expecting to miss the start of the season.” Stoll said he wanted to skate today but was held back, and said he wants to play in exhibition games next week.

“Right now, he’s not in the mix,” Anderson said of Lehtonen. “Saying he’s No. 1, that’s not true. I’ll put him in when he’s actually ready, but right now the No. 1 job is up for grabs. Right now there are four guys that look really good out there.

When the San Jose Sharks lost in the first round of the 2009 playoffs many of their fans called for wholesale changes. The team had done increasingly better in the regular season for the last few years but had no significant playoff success. They won the 2009 President’s Trophy and were expected to do better than a first round playoff loss.

The urge was to trade away key players. Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau were among the candidates to be shipped out of town. That would have been a bad idea for the Sharks. They were not going to get better by subtracting parts. They were highly unlikely to add better pieces in their place if they were trading away their best players.

So here it is, the Three-Star case for the Flyers as Stanley Cup champions this coming June:

1. The Pronger Effect
Not only is Chris Pronger still one of the most dominant, devastating defensemen in the game today, Stanley Cup finals have a way of following him around; especially in his first season with a new team. At least, that’s been the case in the post-lockout NHL and it’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately league, so that’s all the matters.

After nine seasons in St. Louis, Pronger showed up in Edmonton in 2005-06 and led the Oilers to the Cup final against Carolina. Edmonton lost in six games, but the Oilers wouldn’t have come close to advancing that far without the ultra-talented, ultra-snarly defenseman.

The next season, after an auspicious exit from Edmonton (let’s just say, don’t expect Pronger to return to the Oilers a la Mike Comrie anytime soon), he showed up in Anaheim on a blueline that also featured Scott Niedermayer and the pair of future Hall of Famers led the fighty Ducks to a Stanley Cup championship.

Now, Pronger is with his third new team since the lockout. And neither the ’06 Oilers nor the ’07 Ducks were as good as the Flyers – at least on paper – appear to be.

Word is that any day now the Vancouver Canucks are going to give head coach Alain Vigneault a three-year extension on his contract on top of the year he has left.

Now Vigneault is a good NHL coach and has done some fine work here in his three years, but why would general manager Mike Gillis be so generous when there appears to be absolutely no pressing reason why a coach needs what is essentially a four-year deal?

Isn’t that what Brian Burke did with Marc Crawford? He gave his coach a three-year extension and the club ended up dining on a year of that salary. And clearly by the way the Crawford era ended here, that decision should have been made a year earlier, meaning they would have eaten two years of that deal.

BUFFALO, NY (September 13, 2009) – Buffalo Sabres General Manager Darcy Regier announced today the team has signed forward Drew Stafford to a two-year deal.

Stafford (10/30/1985, 6-2, 220 lbs) appeared in 79 games for the Sabres last season collecting NHL career-highs in goals (20), assists (25) and points (45). During the 2008-09 campaign, Stafford had 12 multi-point games and picked up his second career hat trick on January 12 against the Edmonton Oilers.

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